Julieta Gandra

Maria Julieta Guimarães Gandra was born in Oliveira de Azeméis near Porto in Portugal on 16 September 1917, to Mário Gandra and Aurora Rocha Guimarães Gandra. She was one of four children. She graduated in Medicine from Lisbon. While at university she met Ernesto Cochat Osório, a native of Angola. The couple married, had a son, Miguel, and in the mid-1940s left Portugal for its colony, Angola.^[1][2][3]

In Luanda, capital of Angola, Julieta Gandra practiced as a gynaecologist. She had an office in the centre of the city, where she consulted women of the white Portuguese colonial elite, and also attended, for a token fee, Angolan women in a modest office in the poorer areas of the city. Socially, she mixed with many of the Angolan intellectuals who went on to found the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), such as with Agostinho Neto, Lúcio Lara and Paulo Teixeira Jorge. During the 1958 Portuguese presidential campaign, at a rally in support of the opposition leader Humberto Delgado, she addressed, at the beginning of her speech, the "black mothers".^[1][3]

Accused of conspiring against Portugal's external security, of being a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, of giving money to the MPLA and of having invited an MPLA member to dinner, she was arrested in August 1959 and detained in a psychiatric hospital while awaiting trial. She was tried, together with other defendants, in what was the first political trial of Angolan nationalists and became known as the "Process of the '50s", for having the intention of "separating, by violent or illegal means, the territory of Angola from the Motherland". No evidence was presented and her lawyer was not permitted to leave Lisbon to defend her in Luanda. She was initially sentenced to a year in prison but this was increased to three years after the Government appealed.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}

While Gandra was in prison, a 6-month pregnant Portuguese woman went to the offices of the PIDE (International and State Defence Police) and demanded that Gandra be allowed to continue to assist her. The authorities eventually permitted this, allowing her to visit the mother's house for the delivery, accompanied by security guards. When word got out that this had happened other women demanded the same support, as Gandra was effectively the only gynaecologist in Angola at that time. She was thus permitted to leave prison on numerous occasions to assist with births.^[2][3][4][6]